Will Joe Biden have the guts and/or the sense to recognize sunk costs?
There’s not a single person that has spent significant time on the ground in either of those conflicts that thinks either of them are winnable, but they just continue off of a sense of momentum. And getting back to that lack of accountability, not actually having anything be aligned to an objective, nobody could say what winning looked like when I was in Iraq. Our job was to run out the clock, turn off the lights, and close the door. In Afghanistan, same thing. The endless wars notion is just that these wars will continue to go on, because at the end of the day they’re not our wars to fight. We’ve inserted ourselves into the middle of civil wars; we’ve taken sides. Sometimes those sides switch. In Iraq, we’re backing the Sunnis one time, we’re backing the Shia the other. In Afghanistan, it becomes a shifting set of alliances.
Ultimately I think that erodes something at the core of our national soul that we kind of paper over. That’s something that I’ll have to sit on a therapist’s couch to better understand.
This is from Matt Welch, “Amash’s Successor Peter Meijer: Trump’s Deceptions Are ‘Rankly Unfit’,” Reason, January 8, 2020.
READER COMMENTS
Alan Goldhammer
Jan 8 2021 at 6:02pm
Let us hope that Meijer is the future of the Republican party in the House compared to some of the others new electees.
David Henderson
Jan 9 2021 at 12:06am
I agree.
MarkW
Jan 9 2021 at 10:13am
I agree too, but he probably won’t be. He’s from a west Michigan area that didn’t vote for Trump in the Republican primaries. It’s hard to describe the culture there, but they’re a bit like a Dutch-Reformed version of the Mormons. Religious, frequently blonde, nice, polite, respectable. Community focused. Not radical. I hope I’m wrong but, I’m not sure the Peter Meijer version of Republicanism would sell very well in many other places these days.
Rebes
Jan 9 2021 at 5:44pm
Very insightful quote.
Of course, I could have told Peter Meier that these wars are not winnable before he went to Iraq. One way to stop these wars is for Americans to stop signing up to fight them. They may pretend that they are serving our country, but they are really mercenaries.
nobody.really
Jan 11 2021 at 2:57pm
Fair points, all.
ON THE FLIP SIDE: Donald Trump’s foreign/econ policy violated a lot of (wise) norms. But the ship has sailed, the damage is done, the costs have been incurred–whereas the hoped-for benefits might yet accrue.
Thus, I suspect Obama’s Iran deal was wise. But we flushed it already, and instead imposed sanctions on Iran. Should we now give up on those sanctions, even if there’s little hope of limiting Iran’s progress in developing weapons?
Trump imposed tariffs on China, etc. This may have been bad public policy from the beginning. But now that we’re in the middle of this policy, does it make sense to simply repeal the tariffs? Or should Biden seek concessions in order to relax the tariffs?
More generally, Trump did much to demonize China in the minds of the US population. China has its strengths and weaknesses, like all nations–but China happen to be a lot bigger than other nations, and so we care more about those strengths and weaknesses. Given where we are now, should Biden continue Trump’s practice of demonization, or not?
Trump threw the Palestinians under the bus, moved the Israeli embassy to Jerusalem, and pressured Arab states to normalize relations with Israel. Maybe the costs of these policies exceed their benefit–but the costs have already been incurred. Should Biden reverse these policies, or build on them?
David Seltzer
Jan 11 2021 at 4:04pm
Biden is human and heir to sunk cost fallacy. Thaler has a nice example of this. Would Biden think on the margin and see that the money is spent and cost exceeds benefit going forward?
nobody.really
Jan 11 2021 at 4:46pm
I’ll beat Lemieux to the punch: Exceeds benefits going forward for whom?
Imagine Biden acts to withdraw the troops. Possible outcomes:
1: Things go to hell–Biden gets blamed.
2: Things don’t go to hell–no one notices, so irrelevant to Biden.
Imagine Biden takes no action, leaving the status quo. Possible outcomes:
1: Things go to hell–Biden blames Trump for creating an untenable situation.
2: Things don’t go to hell–no one notices, so irrelevant to Biden
As far as I can tell, Biden has a self-interest in not touching this issue with a ten-foot pole. Now, MAYBE Biden concludes that things will certainly go to hell at some point over the next four years, and he can’t pin this issue on Trump forever, so he might as well make a virtue of necessity and pull the plug now. But maybe not.
David Seltzer
Jan 11 2021 at 6:19pm
For whom? The taxpayer. The combatant. The collateral damage war visits on innocents. During the Vietnam War, I served in in SE Asia, 1962 to 1964. A war that involved us, the French and Aussies from 1955 to 1975. The toll? millions dead and NO U.S. VICTORY! You miss the point by a wide margin! Biden NOT thinking on the margin imposes costs that exceed benefits to we the people. A real world example. Eight years after they intervened in Afghanistan, Soviet troops withdrew, marking the end to a protracted bloody occupation of Afghanistan. It’s estimated by various sources some 20,000 Russian combatants died in Afghanistan. The toll to the Russian economy, already in dire straits, ran into billions of dollars. It’s estimated two million Afghan men, women and children died in the war. THATS FOR WHOM!!!
nobody.really
Jan 11 2021 at 10:23pm
Exactly. And none of the people you mention will make the decision whether to withdraw. Biden and his generals–and, conceptually, congressmen–will. So we might want to consider THEIR interests and perspectives.
Economics has long documented the principal/agent problem–specifically, that agents often have different interests than their principals, and therefore fail to act fully in the interest of their principals.
Now, hopefully, Biden et al. care about the interests of the people you mention. But I do not regard this as a foregone conclusion.
David Seltzer
Jan 12 2021 at 9:33am
“Economics has long documented the principal/agent problem–specifically, that agents often have different interests than their principals, and therefore fail to act fully in the interest of their principals.” Nobody, you just hit the nail on the head. When ever we elect these people, we risk agency problem as well as moral hazard.
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